Shaping The Invisible was presented at the conference ‘Look Out! Photography and the Worlds of Contemporary Art’, March 15 – 18 2007, Miami, Florida. The impetus for the paper came from her own visual work as shown in Magic Within Reason (DomoBaal, London 2004), and the paper for Smoke and Mirrors. She discusses the ideas and practice of Zielinsky and Mulvey, and revisits and revises the discourse around the representation of time in the photographic image between the still and the moving image.
Contrary Discourses of Illusion; Getting Into The Spirit of Things was a keynote presentation at the symposium ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ at Midlands Art Centre (MAC) on 1 April 2006. Jean’s paper explored the historical link between photography and magic in relation to spiritualist photography of the late nineteenth century, when the photographic image literally was a magical screen that sought to provide evidence of the afterlife in materialist terms, particularly in relation to the photographic images indexical and instantaneous nature.
Audio/Visual/Projection at the Melbourne Festival, August 2005 and August 2006. Jean’s contribution to the 2005 event, the “Improvised Mango Photograph”, was a meditation through image and text of what it might mean to improvise a photograph, drawing upon Italo Calvino’s short story about the Adventures Of A Photographer. In 2006 her contribution was a photographic image “Ode to the Engineer”, to mark the life of the artist Alexej Gastev, 1882-1941, a poet and revolutionary who saw the founding of the Russian Institute of Labour as his greatest artistic achievement.
